CryptoSocio

What is CryptoSocio and how it works?

CryptoSocio is a back end reputation system designed to run on top of Ethereum. Its principles however may certainly be implemented in other similar crypto currency platforms.

It works by allowing anyone to upload content to a decentralized network, tag the content with a short but meaningful sentence and then allow anyone to ‘vote’ on that tag.

Decentralizing Academic Publishing

Out of all the possible implementations of CryptoSocio, perhaps the most important one and one closest to the my heart, is the decentralization of academic publishing.

Academic publishing today suffers from a variety of problems that have been observed and mentioned by many. One of its critical flaws is its outdated reliance on centuries-old print publishing methods and corporations, who require copyrights of academic content before they peer review and broadcast them as scholarly journals.

Another flaw is the university system’s dependency on government subsidies in the form of guaranteed student loans.

The funds allow universities to fund expensive tenure for academics, which make it worthwhile for them to peer review, edit and give away their intellectual fruits for free.

It also allows universities to buy those scholarly journals back through their libraries at exuberant costs, adding up to thousands of dollars per journal.

The CryptoSocio platform is most impressive in its potential to disrupt legacy academic publishing systems, and enhance the reach of the Open access movement.

Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work. The list of important scientific papers that were initially rejected by peer-reviewed journals goes back at least as far as the editor of Philosophical Transaction’s 1796 rejection of Edward Jenner’s report of the first vaccination against smallpox.

It is as if CryptoSocio was made in heaven, specifically to solve this problem.

CryptoSocio’s capacity to incentivize the finding, reviewing and promoting of high quality disruptive information is what makes it a revolutionary piece of software.

Its incentives could allow inventors in all fields to no longer depend on government subsidies, nor political forces, while hacking the resistance to disruptive innovations that human beings seem to be so prone to.

Organizations of experts in all fields which could solve human problems would likely arise and compete to find and promote innovative solutions.

Investors could get a piece of the pie by funding research that would reward their efforts with popular products, appreciated by end users through a free market of ideas.

Information would be readily available and free -or very cheap- to access, since more people having access to the content would mean more potential voters.

If such a platform is unleashed on the web, it will make little sense for the innovators of knowledge — scholars- to continue within legacy systems. And even if they do, their content can be uploaded and profited on by others who see its potential.

APPLICATIONS IN MACHINE LEARNING

Machine learning focuses on the construction and study of systems that can learn from data, akin to an anthropologist attempting to decipher strange hieroglyphs. Machine learning — a core element of AI- is facing the challenge of mostly having access to content that has been evaluated based on an up or down vote mechanic.

Google is very aware of this problem and has been paying workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to semantically tag content. This data would be used to advance machine learning technologies, ideally allowing computer programs to read and understand human created content, far beyond what search engines are capable of.

The semantic tagging of CryptoSocio would incentivise such work on its platform at a much larger and more organic scale.

The part which I love the most about CryptoSocio is its semantic representation of content. It could be the largest and best natural language processing database.

I see a future where Facebook-like social networking sites would run on the CryptoSocio reward system, allowing for a direct monetization of content “delivering its monetary value back to the people”.